


Equal Exchange

by Crownofpins



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: M/M, coziness, gee ed why do you get to have TWO dads, leisurely touching, rude questions about limbs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 09:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crownofpins/pseuds/Crownofpins
Summary: Boys cosleeping on couches. It's dark, it's cold, and bodily autonomy is the hot seasonal topic.





	Equal Exchange

* * *

“Why,” Greed gripes, hunched over the excuse for a fire they’ve got started, “didn’t I go somewhere warmer?”

“Beats me,” Ed replies, too tired and cold to bicker. Heinkel and Darius, perched right next to each other on the dusty, sagging couch, sharing their blankets peaceably, keep their silence.

They’d been lucky- really, really lucky, Ed thinks, not ungratefully- to find a dilapidated old cabin in the woods after the first hour of walking through the storm. Ed hadn’t experienced any accumulations of snow up until their (Al and his, he thinks sourly, and shoots Greed-Wearing-Ling a shitty look) ill-fated journey up to Briggs. To say that he’s unused to winter is putting it generously.

As shitty as it all had been, he has to acknowledge that Winry being dragged up as an unwitting hostage had worked out. If his automail hadn’t been upgraded by her deft hands… He purposefully doesn’t think about when she would lean all her weight on him to pop a component out and then in, doesn’t think about her breath on his shoulder as she worked at the finer connection points, doesn’t think about how she had to plant a knee on his chest and hold him down to get a stuck hydraulic chamber casing out, except he’s a fucking teenager and _of course he does._

He’s in hell.

The cabin is in poor shape, but most of the brick walls are intact, and were easy enough to seal again with a little alchemy. Ed can’t do anything about the insulation of the little shack, but neither can anybody else, so after a little yelling they’d all settled down to scrunch together in misery.

Or, well, Heinkel and Darius had.

“Too old to be worried about that kind of thing,” Darius had grunted, and Heinkel had agreed with a nod and a roll of his shoulders. There was something funny about watching the two men, neither of them small by any measure, comfortably huddled on a tiny couch sagging under their weight.

Funny until Greed tried the same with Ed on the other seat, and man was he Not Having That. The yelling and jumping and stomping had mostly kept Ed warm, at least.

Now it’s night, and as the temperature drops in the damp little hole they’re denned down in, Ed clutches his blanket around him miserably.

“You’re so stubborn,” Darius sighs. “Do you want to join us?”

“I’m fine!” Ed insists, tucking a little edge of a snarl into his voice. Greed glances up at him from where he’s slowly feeding the fire, leaned against the crooked brick of the chimney. Ed can’t imagine that Ling’s body is especially well-suited to cold climes. He wonders if that’s Ling’s problem to deal with, if he can even feel his body, or if Greed is keeping him locked down under him without even the anchor of flesh.

“All right,” Darius says, shrugging and leaning back against the faintly-snoring Heinkel. “I’m going to sleep, then. If you kids go to sleep too, put a big log on before you do.”

“I’m older than all of you put together,” Greed retorts.

“I’d like to see the math on that,” Darius says, rolling to face Heinkel better and share the blankets more efficiently, and Greed opens his mouth to retort

but then he gives a full-body shiver, goosebumps rising up the back of his neck, and something about that motivates him to keep his silence. He looks into the fire, and even to Ed’s untrained eyes, it looks like he’s brooding.

 

 

 

Ed doesn’t mean to doze, but it happens anyway. He catches the world in little flickers of consciousness, fleeting golden flashes like the pattern on a butterfly’s wings as it flutters from flower to flower. He sees Greed looking at him, dips out, comes back in and out and in and out to see Heinkel and Darius spooning in increasingly elaborate configurations, dips out again, and finally comes to with the realization that he’s so cold his hand and foot are in _pain_.

He tries rubbing his hand with his automail one, but that doesn’t do jack. Stuffing his hand in his armpit doesn’t help with his foot. Wiggling his toes in his boot doesn’t do much either. Ed unlaces his boot, takes out his cold foot gingerly, and tries to warm himself up that way, flesh hand to flesh foot. The pose is awkward and it doesn’t help his situation one iota.

He can feel Greed watching him and feels frustration, humiliation, exasperation, shame, and a million more things marching up and down his spine like ants.

“Need some help?” Greed offers, the purple of his eyes catching the firelight and brightening them to violet. He’s put a big log on the fire after all, though Ed’s pretty sure the homunculus doesn’t need to sleep. How does that work with Ling’s body? Does _Ling_ need to sleep, inside himself? _Can_ Ling? “Hey, don’t space out on me. I asked you a question, it’s only polite to respond.”

Ed shuffles in place on the damp couch, feeling the stab of cold cramps in the two precious limbs he’s got left.

“Yeah,” he says, ducking his head, cringing.

“Yeah you-? Huh.” Greed gives him an evaluating look. He gets a leering grin on his face for a second, but it fades quickly when Ed simply continues to look away. There’s a philosophical shrug complete with an eyebrow raise that’s very not-Ling before he stands up and comes to flop down next to Ed on the loveseat.

Greed’s abrupt entrance raises a cloud of dust. There’s a squeaking under him that Ed really, really hopes is just rusted springs. Darius squints open an eye at the noise, looks at the fire, richly fed, and promptly passes out again.

“C’mere,” Greed huffs, reaching for Ed with strong but fine-boned hands. Ed lets him take his hand and can’t quite suppress the soft sigh of relief he gives- Ling’s hands, both clasped over his one, are very, very warm. They’re nothing like the hands Greed had when they first met.

“Is it weird for you?” Ed asks quietly, murmurs really, before he can think better of it.

“I’d like to think I’m pretty familiar with how fragile humans are lately,” Greed says just as quietly. They may be speaking a bit overcautiously, Ed contemplates, because the wind is howling like a wolf outside. Darius and Heinkel are snoring away on the couch, looking for all the world like a pair of hibernating bears.

“No,” Ed says, “I mean, the whole…” he jerks his head. “Ling thing. I know it must be weird for him. But you had a body of your own before, and now it’s… not yours, kind of.”

“You tell me,” Greed says, his expression drawing down sourly, “you’d be the resident expert on getting a fucked-up new body setup.”

Ed jerks back, but Greed keeps a hold on his hand. All Ed can feel are the rough pads of his fingers—harsh from Ling handling weapons, explosives, from climbing up buildings and pulling up comrades. They don’t feel any different than Ling’s hands did, but the way they move is Greed all the way down. They lack the little flickers of grace that Ling would try to stifle, the fluid way he naturally moved that Ling would always try to dumb down so that he seemed less out-of-place than he already was. Greed, though. Greed moves with purpose from point A to point B, always towards a goal, a prize. It’s not that he’s graceless, but his movements are much more efficient, almost brutally so at times.

It’s strange to see Ed’s hand clutched in that sigil-marked hold.

“Sorry,” Greed says evenly, still rubbing Ed’s hand, massaging a little. “Meaner than I meant it to be. Take off your other boot and tuck your legs up. You’re cold as hell. The little prince in here’s been moaning about catching a cold all damn day, too, so that should shut him up.”

Ed takes his newly-warmed hand back to untie his laces. He gives his automail toes a wiggle, then his flesh ones. His flesh foot is cold and pale.

“I’m trying to mind the house as best I can,” Greed says quietly, reaching down to pull Ed’s feet into a warmer place. “What’s the point of having everything if you let it fall to junk in your hands?”

Ed tries to wrap his mind around that admission, but he’s distracted by how awkwardly Greed is trying to position his feet.

“Just don’t- ow, ow, that _hurts_ ,” Ed struggles against Greed, who is currently trying to move him like he’s any level as flexible as Ling is. Heinkel’s suspicious eyes slit open; Ed ignores him and folds his automail leg under him, leaves his flesh one out. Greed seizes as decisively at his foot as he had at Ed’s hand. “Not everybody’s got noodles for bones like Ling does, cut it out.”

“Tch,” Greed says, cupping Ed’s foot in his hands. “You should be grateful I’m helping you out.”

Heinkel shuts his eyes again, apparently satisfied that Ed isn’t being inappropriately mauled.

“Shut up,” Ed grumbles, because open emotional expression is for people who haven’t lived their entire lives moving from one increasingly horrible revelation to the next.

“How’s that?” Greed asks, working a thumb in a tight circle against the underside of Ed’s foot. Depressingly, it feels good.

“Fine,” Ed says.

“Since we’re playing the always-fun ‘awkward shitty questions’ game, mind if I ask one?”

Ed gives Greed a suspicious look. The homunculus is still massaging at his foot, though, and it’s both been so long since he had any affectionate human touch _and_ since he’s felt any pleasure from his limbs that he can’t muster the mean-spiritedness to refuse.

“I’m not going to answer if it’s too shitty,” Ed tells him firmly, because footrub or no, he’s been asked some _real_ whoppers in his brief time on this earth, and he doesn’t want to indulge anything too irritating.

“Do your stumps hurt?”

The question is asked so guilelessly, with a flicker of black to those purple eyes that makes Ed think again about how this all _works_ for Greed and Ling. The question itself is startling, if only because people don’t usually ask about-- about that. Usually he gets questions about dexterity, and repairs, and strength and tensile load and often other things that are none of anybody’s business but his own. Mostly, he’s asked about his automail limbs by themselves, as if he’s only attached to them, as if they’re not _part_ of him. He can count on one (flesh) hand the number of people who have asked about his lived experience of _having_ automail limbs.

“First of all,” Ed huffs, “My shoulder doesn’t _have_ a stump. Just my leg.”

Greed looks him up and down. Ed tries not to bristle. It’s not as if he’s seen those parts of Ed’s body unclothed with any frequency, and certainly not up close. Not like Winry.

“My bad,” he says, shrugging.

“Sometimes,” Ed continues, very quietly. “They hurt more when I was….” He sighs, “growing more.” Greed gives him an amused, sharp-toothed smile, which makes Ed want to punch him. “I’m still growing!”

“Sure, sure,” Greed says, in Ling’s body, which has been going up even in the brief time Ed has known him, the lucky bastard.

“Someday I’m going to be seven feet tall,” Ed huffs, and then, in an unthinking, instinctive moment, he swings his automail leg out from under him and into Greed’s reach. Greed reaches for it, uh, greedily, if Ed had to characterize the motion. He turns Ed’s flesh and metal ankles this way and that, one in each hand, watching the range of motion he has, the speed of reaction. “Automail is getting better. Winry really focuses on user comfort, which is a big part of why she’s such a popular mechanic.”

“Oh yeah?” Greed asks, rubbing a thumb at both of Ed’s anklebones. “Comfort, huh. Can you feel where I’m touching you?”

Ed opens his mouth to ask _why_ , but then remembers: Ling and Lan Fan. In a way, too, this is answering some of the awkward questions _he’d_ had about Ling and Greed. Whether or not Greed will acknowledge the fact, it’s clear that he’s asking questions Ling can use to help Lan Fan, or at least, help him to understand her new circumstances. So, he’s minding Ling’s emotional wellbeing, is paying attention to what he worries about, isn’t he? If he’s trying to ease Ling’s worries about Lan Fan, too, it makes it reasonably clear that Ling isn’t exactly being tortured in there.

If Ed thinks of it that way, the line of questioning suddenly makes Greed seem like a big old softie, really.

“A little pressure,” Ed says. It feels less personal to give that information out when he thinks about the fact that Greed and Ling are collecting it for Lan Fan. “There’s not really sensation, like hot or cold or soft or hard. When I first got my automail, I had a pretty hard time figuring out what amount of force to use on things.” On a whim, he adds, almost slyly, “Lan Fan must be some kind of genius to have started using her automail so well so quickly.”

Greed visibly _preens,_ lifts a hand up and smooths it through his bangs while his eyes go black and happy, and it’s not Greed, is it, it’s Ling.

Heh. He, Edward Elric, youngest ever state alchemist, is the _smartest man on the face of this earth_.

“Speaking of which,” Ling says, a small, tired smile playing around his mouth, “do you know why her arm acted the way it did at the end of that fight?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, as Ling releases his feet. He tucks them under himself, wiggles his fingers and toes happily, and relishes the flow of blood in his extremities. He’s still not _warm_ , but at least his digits aren’t ice-white cold-cramped anymore. “If you use your automail more than you’re used to, it kind of... fries the nerves it’s connecting to?” He puts his automail hand to his chin, thinking. Ling fixes his gaze on Ed’s face, clearly alarmed. “Not permanently!” He waves his hands defensively. “Just… it’s too much, sort of like getting pins and needles if you sit too long. It hurts, but more importantly, you can’t even move properly.”

Ling’s gone in a flash, leaving Greed staring at Ed. Ed wonders what happened there—if Ling was upset by that answer, or if Greed has a question he wants answered.

“I don’t suppose _you_ get tired of using Ling’s body,” Ed says somewhat wryly.

“No pins and needles here,” Greed agrees, reaching out for Ed. This time he goes for Ed’s shoulder, which _boy_ is he wary of. He scoots back, putting some distance between them.

“If anything breaks,” Ed says, his breathing coming a little fast against that challenging stare, “I can’t have it fixed right now. Maybe not for a long time.”

“I won’t break anything,” Greed scoffs. “What the hell. I take good care of my things.”

“I’m not a thing,” Ed fires back, still pressed against the arm of the loveseat, “and I’m not _your_ thing even if I was.”

“Everything in the world is mine,” Greed says, again, for the umpteenth time, but he gives such a charming sly smile as he does that Ed lets him touch his right shoulder after all. As with Ed’s foot, he’s gentle, his touch barely registering against the dimmed senses of Ed’s automail. “How does this all attach, anyway? Alchemied in?”

“Surgery,” Ed tells him, waving his hands back so he can shuck his jacket and one sleeve to show off where it all connects. The air is cold, and it raises goosebumps on his skin, but Ed’s never been shy about Winry’s work on him before. He doesn’t see any reason to start now. “Alchemy can’t make the nerve connections precisely enough.”

Greed’s fingers slide up from the ball socket that is his shoulder joint to where flesh and metal meet. He runs his fingers along the visible seam, shifting unthinkingly to straddle Ed so he can peer into the small gaps in the shoulder joining.

“Shit,” he says, quietly, reverently. “Look at all this stuff. You had to have this all put in, what? By hand?”

“Yeah,” Ed mutters. “Winry and Pinako, her grandmother, did that.”

“How does it hold on to your body?” Greed asks, giving an experimental tug at Ed’s shoulder. Ed goes with the pull, making an irritated face. “Feels solid.”

“I _told_ you,” Ed says, his temper starting to edge sharp. “Surgery. They took out the mess I’d left behind and put in the nerve connections and the socket.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Did it hurt to get shoved into Ling?”

Greed grins with teeth, turns his head to face Ed.

“Didn’t hurt _me_.”

Ed and Greed sit like that for a moment, staring at each other. Thanks to Greed’s enthusiasm for Ed’s automail, they’re now close enough that Ed has to lean back a little, straining against the arm of the loveseat, to keep their faces from being awkwardly close. The grin the homunculus is holding is making it a little weird, actually. His fingers are still on Ed’s shoulder, right at that seam between automail and skin.

“You’re in pain sometimes,” Ed says, because he can’t really leave this weird tit-for-tat discussion like this, can’t leave it hanging on such a light, flippant note when Greed had just been grilling him on a particular personal agony that has a live-wire connection straight to his heart. “I’ve seen you clutching at your head. What’s that about?”

Greed’s grin drops.

“None of your business,” he says, eyes going a particular kind of hard that calls to mind the other members of his family.

“That’s bullshit,” Ed says, pushing at Greed’s chest. He doesn’t move. “I’m not telling you anything else about automail, then. You can just figure it out on your own.”

“Hey,” Greed whines. “Hang on. I just wanted to ask some practical stuff.”

“Yeah, well, then ask _that_. If _that’s_ none of my business, what you asked is none of yours.”

“Tsk.” Greed curls his lip resignedly. “I know you can throw a good punch. Carrying stuff okay? It doesn’t pull on your body, does it?”

“I’m fine,” Ed says, forcing himself to think of Ling, of Lan Fan. “I’ve been healed over for years. Somebody whose automail was newer, though- they’d have to be careful. They could rip something, damage nerves. At the very least there’d be some pretty heavy bleeding.” He doesn’t want to be too obvious, in case Greed gets skittish and gives up, but he also knows what he wishes he’d been told in those first bleary weeks when he woke up every day and had to remember, again and again and again, how his limbs had turned themselves into metal simulacrums of the real thing. “I had to do special exercises to build up my strength again. I couldn’t carry things at first, yeah, but it was mostly because I had a hard time balancing on my leg.”

“Doesn’t hurt when you have to carry firewood or luggage?” Greed murmurs, his fingers pressing and stroking at Ed’s seam again. Ed blinks, thrown off-guard, because that feels _nice_. Being-pinned-down-by-Winry nice. It’s something about the firmness of his fingers, the confidence of his touch. He’s not unnerved by the expansive scarring, that much is clear.

“It’s okay,” Ed mutters, falling into an easier position against Greed, legs sprawled under him and shoulder stretched wide open for his perusal. “Like I said, I’ve been healed for ages. Winry did a really good job setting the rods and pins and stuff for the hardware installation.”

“I wonder,” Greed says, his hand scooping further under Ed’s clothing, the broad warmth of his palm pleasant against the join along his back, “if Daddy Sir’d chosen to shove me into you, if my ultimate armor would go over this too, or no.”

Ed opens his mouth to say, _probably not_ , but then he pauses. It’s partially because he actually doesn’t know, not when it’s alchemy anyway, and partially because the idea of Greed in him is so startling.

Greed scowls for no reason, then laughs lowly before Ed manages to muster a response.

“The little prince didn’t like that. Says there’s not a greedy bone in your body.”

“I can be greedy,” Ed fires back, incensed at the accusation of being anything but a horrible clutching gremlin, “I want a _lot_ of things.”

“Yeah?” Greed asks, his hand slipping from Ed’s metal shoulder to the ridge of his spine, his legs falling a little more loosely where he sits on Ed. He looks at Ed more closely, his gaze darting from Ed’s eyes to his mouth and then back up; he bites his own bottom lip, licks it. “Like what?”

Ed looks back at him helplessly, feeling his breath come a little quicker, feeling the press of Greed on top of him, holding him down not _quite_ like Winry does. It’s close enough that it leaves him feeling good, contented, leaves him feeling taken care of and happy to oblige whoever’s doing the holding. Greed’s face is so close to his. All he has to do is lean the slightest bit in. But-

His gaze darts to Darius and Heinkel. They’re still snoring, arms looped around each other, blissfully unaware of the intense struggle Ed is having with himself about how to respond. _Ah_ , he thinks with an air of faint envy, _to be old and not have to worry about stuff like this anymore._

The silence stretches on well past the point where Ed can make a graceful response, so he doesn’t try. He colors and turns his face away, looking at the fireplace. He feels Greed shifting, getting ready to pull back, but in what Ed considers a decisive moment of victory, he manages to reach up and snag Greed’s sleeve, tugging him down again over his body.

Greed shrugs philosophically and leans back down, returns to examining Ed’s arm. It still feels good, sends little tingles of pleasure racing across his skin at every deliberate touch. That it _does_ feel good also feels about nine thousand percent more awkward now. Greed moves to touch Ed’s neck, his thumb polishing at his collarbone briefly, and Ed can’t resist leaning into that.

“This okay?” he asks, and the sheer gentlemanliness of the question snaps Ed’s gaze away from where he’s staring, mortified about his own shyness, into the fire.

“Y- yeah,” he agrees, taking a deep breath. Ed clenches his hands, then relaxes slowly. “I don’t mind. It’s good.”

Greed goes back to his touching. He seems content not to push to go any further, but also content to stay close where Ed’s kept him. He spends a long time investigating Ed’s shoulder, touching both metal and flesh. He drags his nails along the line of old surgical staple marks and watches Ed shudder with eyes glittering too darkly to make the color out.

Time passes like that. Ed is put in the unusual position of being both desperately, wildly turned on and so aggressively relaxed that he feels like he could melt into the loveseat. Life is hard and so is he.

He’s dangerously close to nodding off when he hears Greed murmuring something. It’s hard to pull himself back to consciousness, but he does it—he’s more than earned another answer to a question, hasn’t he?

“So if he’s this,” Greed says, softly, almost to himself despite his proximity, despite the fact that he’s so close to Ed that his breath stirs the fine hairs on his skin, and he rubs his thumb firmly over the glossy, drawn skin of Ed’s shoulder, now pinker from all the attention Greed’s been giving it tonight, “am I this?” and his fingers slide to Ed’s automail.

Ed’s gaze gets stuck on the ceiling for a moment before he manages to wrench his eyes over to Greed’s. He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He can’t bring himself to defend Greed’s right to inhabit Ling’s body, but when Greed asks like that, he can’t bring himself to agree with the premise, either.

“No feeling, right?” Greed says, pressing on the metal. “Just pressure.”

“Greed,” says Ed, alarmed, stricken abruptly by the impossible sadness of what he’s being asked, if in a roundabout way.

“Forget it,” Greed says sharply, perhaps reading some of Ed’s horror on his face. “Night.” And, releasing Ed’s shoulder, he tips his head sideways and appears to go to sleep so quickly that it seems almost sarcastic.

Ed, sandwiched between the weight of the body on him and the arm of the loveseat, can’t do much more than pull the blanket up over them awkwardly. He makes sure to tuck his feet up on the loveseat to keep them warm; Greed’s legs shift to sandwich Ed’s feet between them. Ed honestly isn’t certain if Greed is genuinely asleep or not, but he’s not going to look a (warm) gift horse in the mouth, no matter how awkward it will probably be in the light of the morning.

He lies awake for a long time, eyes tracing the birthmark-red ouroboros on Ling’s hand in the dim firelight. He lies awake and he thinks.

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ed, your two bear dads are just trying to do their best to raise you right okay
> 
> come whisper secrets to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/crownofpins) or [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/Crownofpins)


End file.
